Top 3 screenplay pet peeves..

[Jonathan Spear]

Many of you here have a few projects under your belts.

 

What are the three most annoying things you came across in screenplays you were trying shoot?

[Chad Stockfleth]

Many of you here have a few projects under your belts.

 

What are the three most annoying things you came across in screenplays you were trying shoot?

 

 

Kids, Pets and .....Kids! ;-)

[David Mullen ASC]

Well, there are always red flags for productions to deal with, like animals, kids, efx, night exteriors, and montage sequences (I had all of those on my last shoot.)

 

But in terms of screenwriting, Number One by far is an over-reliance on dialogue. Too many indie scripts I get are wall-to-wall talking, as if everyone wants to be the next Kevin Smith or Tarentino. But the trouble is that the dialogue is generally mediocre and the script is not visually driven. And they think that good cinematography will somehow make a non-visual script into something visual. It doesn't work that way. Visual movies come from visual scripts.

 

Otherwise, there are always technical problems with scripts, like not breaking down scenes by location properly, so some scene listed as "KITCHEN" has a line like "She closes the fridge door and walks up the stairs into her bedroom, noticing that the window is open. She sees a car speeding away in the night through the window."

 

Or being vague about time-of-day, like calling a scene "EVENING" as opposed to "NIGHT." Either a scene is during the day, or as the sun is setting, or at magic hour (dusk or twilight) or it's dark outside (night). So "early night" may mean something story-wise, but it means less photographically. So I find myself marking call sheets as to what "EVENING" means, i.e. is it dark outside, or is it twilight.

[Bob Hayes]

My most hated scene is the daytime storm. I live in Southern California and shoot in sunny climates all the time and it is nearly impossible to make it look storming during a summer day.

[Dan Goulder]

My most hated scene is the daytime storm. I live in Southern California and shoot in sunny climates all the time and it is nearly impossible to make it look storming during a summer day.

Try spending a few days in Cleveland...

[Phil Rhodes]

Being over-obvious.

 

Silent Hill - "Ashes!". Yes, you stupid woman, we know they're ashes, that's why they're grey and floaty, and presumably why we've had all the fire references up to now. Grr.

 

Phil

[Brad Grimmett]

Too much exposition (as Phil eluded to) is annoying. We've seen something happen and now the character has to go tell every other character what happened....it's a waste of time.

[Sol Train Saihati]

Being over-obvious.

 

Silent Hill - "Ashes!". Yes, you stupid woman, we know they're ashes, that's why they're grey and floaty, and presumably why we've had all the fire references up to now. Grr.

 

Phil

Right on Phil... Haha!

 

Middle aged cop wakes up in the morning, wearing the same clothes he had on last night, next to half a bottle of Jack Daniels and a picture of his ex wife.

Edited May 11, 2006 by djdumpy

[Dan Salzmann]

Excessive and/or ignorant "camera indications" from screenwriters such as zoom in, extreme closeup, etc.

Best to leave 99% of this to the director and DP to define unless indicating this kind of stuff is absolutely essential to the screenplay.